Reproductive justice for all

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If African-American women have more abortions it is not down to a conspiracy but because basic needs are not being met

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  • Latoya Peterson
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 5 March 2010 10.30 GMT
  • Article history

Anti-abortion activists have found a new weapon to wield in the war on choice: drawing comparisons between black abortion rates and cultural genocide. However, their claims distort the truth.
As the New York Times reports, in recent years, anti-abortion organisations have changed tactics, now specifically targeting African Americans. While black women make up less than 10% of the US population, we account for more than a third of the demand for abortion services. Now, organisations like Georgia Right to Life have decided to spend more money on minority outreach, taking the fight to colleges and churches, and peddling the message that black women are being swept up in a large scale conspiracy to eliminate black people. The Times points out:

"A new documentary, written and directed by Mark Crutcher, a white abortion opponent in Denton, Texas, meticulously traces what it says are connections among slavery, Nazi-style eugenics, birth control and abortion, and is being regularly screened by black organisations."

The ideas propagated by the pro-life movement are based in some truths. Margaret Sanger, a major birth control advocate who shepherded the founding of birth control clinics was a staunch advocate of eugenics, the belief that selective breeding could eliminate undesirables from society. On her list were racial minorities, those in poverty, the mentally ill and disabled people. While Sanger was against abortion, she was in favour of forced sterilisation and segregation. (Her Scottish counterpart, Marie Stopes, was also a proponent of eugenics and believed sterilisation should be compulsory for what she termed "unfit" parents.)
However, anti-choice protesters seem to forget that the women seeking abortions are doing so voluntarily, for many different reasons. If black women have a disproportionately high number of abortions, it is not because of a grandiose conspiracy theory, but that the basic needs of women in our society are not being met. Additionally, many women of colour have begun organising outside of the pro-choice/pro-life framework, looking instead to a solution based in reproductive justice. The idea behind the reproductive justice movement isn't simply abortion rights, but a multitude of other issues. As activist Kimala Price explains:

"Reproductive justice is not just about the individualistic right to have an abortion (ie, the right not to have children) but to include the right to have children and to raise them in healthy and stable families. Accordingly, these activists have broadened reproductive rights and freedom beyond abortion rights, the rights to privacy and "choice" which are normally associated with the movement. In sum, reproductive justice encompasses many other issues such as economic justice, immigration rights, housing rights, and access to healthcare."

Loretta Ross, current national director and one of the founding members of SisterSong – the women of colour reproductive justice collective – has tackled this issue often, revealing that black women have been on the frontlines of the reproductive justice debates for years, and actively advocated for birth control. When it was discovered that large numbers of black women were dying from illegal, back alley abortions, our community organised to earn the right for a safe way to terminate pregnancies. As Ross writes in her definitive piece on African American Women and Abortion (pdf):

"Despite the fact that much of the decline in the fertility rates of African Americans since the civil war resulted from the activism and determined choices of African-American women, our contributions to the birth control and abortion movements in the United States have been obscured by racist and sexist assumptions about us, our sexuality, and our fertility. Distilling fact from myth is difficult because so many accounts of African-American and women's history are written from perspectives that fail to acknowledge our impact. This omission distorts the contemporary views of African-American women about the reproductive freedom movement and our ownership of it."

And there are dozens of other issues involved in why women make the choices they do, far more than the mainstream anti-abortion movement prefers to acknowledge. Miriam Perez, a radical doula and Latina activist discusses how healthcare and access change the discussions on "choice" for the women she works with:

"These days, the abuses are less obvious and more insidious. When I worked with pregnant Latina immigrants in Pennsylvania, I saw their options limited by the technicalities of their emergency Medicaid coverage. They could get sterilised, for free, right after their deliveries. But if they wanted the pill, the shot, or some other short term birth control? They were out of luck. But what we know is that reproductive justice isn't just about freedom from coercive sterilisation. It's also about access to a full range of reproductive technologies, whether that's birth control, sterilisation, abortion or even childbirth."

However, these issues never seem to make it to the agenda of the pro-life movement, which has expressed interest only in ending abortions; not in improving the lives of women. Perhaps the pro-life community would make more inroads with women of colour if they appeared to care more about easing the conditions leading women to seek abortion and less about flexing political might.

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